


Caged

by madnessiseverything



Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Ezekiel remembers, Flashbacks, Gen, I inflict pain on characters I love, Post-Episode: s02e08 And the Point of Salvation, Post-Episode: s02e10 And the Final Curtain, Referenced violence, The others are there for like a few sentences, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 10:15:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7263880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madnessiseverything/pseuds/madnessiseverything
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ezekiel Jones doesn’t remember the loop instantly. When he comes to in a room illuminated by a slight blue glow that seems oddly familiar with Eve staring at him in pure relief and Jake patting his chest, awe in his voice, he doesn’t remember what happened. </p><p>The one where Ezekiel doesn't remember, until he does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caged

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not even going to pretend I'm sorry for the angst in this one.  
> I love putting my favs through a lot of pain.  
> Thanks to [Andrew](a-r-good.tumblr.com) (who I possibly broke) for beta-ing and making me blush.  
> I hope you enjoy this piece of pain.

Ezekiel Jones doesn’t remember the loop instantly. When he comes to in a room illuminated by a slight blue glow that seems oddly familiar with Eve staring at him in pure relief and Jake patting his chest, awe in his voice, he doesn’t remember what happened. 

He shakes his head as they recount the final loop in the Annex, the word ‘hero’ making his skin itch. He grins and watches Jake leave the room with disbelief clear in his posture, Eve throwing him a smile before leaving too. Cassandra presses a kiss to his cheek and delivers a gentle punch to his crossed arms before following the others out of the room and leaving Ezekiel alone. He turns the story over in his head, something seeming off to him, before he shakes his head and dismisses the thought, moving to leave the too-quiet Annex behind as well.  
  
After he turns away from Eve and Flynn, trapped in the past, a strange sensation of Déjà vu makes his steps stutter for just a second, as if his brain thinks he once walked away from Eve before. He shakes his head and walks away with the others, heart pounding and his hands digging into his pockets. He desperately tries to keep himself together, mindful of Jake and Cassandra staring at the ground as they approach the library. Jenkins is walking ahead of them and Ezekiel can’t do it. He stops, whispers a short goodbye and leaves his team behind. He doesn’t want to be in the library right now. He can’t. He feels like he’s suffocating. 

He knows it’s selfish. But that’s something he’s very good at after all.    
_____

When he wakes up in his apartment with his heart jumping in his chest and tears streaking his face, flashes of blood and pain fresh in his mind, he doesn’t understand the quickly fading images. His hands are shaking and the feeling of pure grief is the only thing that lingers as his room comes into focus. He’s sitting up and his covers are tangled with his legs. Overcome with the urge to text or call Cassandra, Jake and Eve, he closes his eyes and breathes in, then out. The air whistles out from his nose and he opens his eyes. This isn’t the first time a nightmare has felt this real, far from it, but Ezekiel presses his shaking hands to his chest and lets out a shuddering breath. This one was different than the ones that haunted him years ago. He doesn’t know why, but he feels its difference like a burning pain settling into his skin.

He takes a cold shower, longer than usual. He leans against the tiled wall and pushes all thoughts away from his mind. He’s okay. 

He gets out of the shower and grins at himself in the mirror. The feeling the dream left him with isn’t gone but without any memory of the dream itself, he shrugs his shoulders and leaves for the library, ignoring the way his knuckles turn white with tension the closer he gets to the Annex. Ezekiel Jones doesn’t show weakness. 

He walks into the Annex where Cassandra is staring at her clasped hands and Jake is hiding his face behind a book. Cassandra’s dress is grey and Ezekiel wants to comment. Jake looks up with absent eyes and Ezekiel has an image to uphold. He greets loudly and saunters into the shelves, away from Jake’s disapproving glare and Cassandra’s silence. His hands would be shaking, but he is balling them into fists in his jeans pockets. Nobody has to see how out of it he truly is. 

He doesn’t know what he is going to do, but he starts looking through the books around him. He needs to do something. Anything.   
  
When Jake calls for him a while later, a note of confusion in his voice, Ezekiel comes. He gives a small smile to Cassandra, who gives him a saddened look back and Ezekiel quickly turns his head away, focusing on Jake and Jenkins and the words that shouldn’t be on the door. Oxidized green is in contrast to the bronze colored door. Ezekiel wonders how something like that shows up now, the words ominous and yet he can’t help but feel something that prickles like hope in his chest. Hope for what he doesn’t know until they open the door to find a statue of their missing team members inside.

Finding Eve and Flynn in the room makes his heart lurch and the happiness that fills the library as Eve and Cassandra laugh loudly at latter’s joke distracts him from the unsettling feeling of this being too good to be true. Eve gives him a folder about Magical Crime and he banters with Jake and Cassandra shakes her head. Things are good, like they’re supposed to be. Things are great.   
  
So Ezekiel can’t explain why his nights get worse. He wakes up with a hoarse throat, raw from screaming for his friends. He wakes up with the image of Cassandra being pulled away from him, her fingers slipping out of his grasp and leaving sticky red behind. He claws at the sheets holding his body captive as pictures of Jake, turning to yell at him with blood coating his words and the floor, burn themselves into his brain. He listens to Eve telling him a story about brave soldiers, only for her voice to get choked up as her breath leaves her forever, dull eyes facing Ezekiel with accusation.

He wakes up feeling sick, or angry, but always he is in pain, raw and unfiltered pain as he dreams of his friends dying in so many ways, each time just out of his reach.

_______

It takes weeks for the fog in his mind to suddenly disappear. Ezekiel wakes with a scream that rings in his own ears like an alarm, the scene of his friends overrun by mad people burned into the inside of his eyelids. And he knows the dream is more than just that – he knows it like he knows Cassandra and Jake have noticed his lack of sleep but don’t say anything just yet – he knows it’s real. He remembers. 

He remembers screaming at his friends, voice breaking as he tells them every terrible thing he has ever done. He remembers sitting down and just blankly staring at them while they try to understand what is happening. He remembers Eve and Cassandra and Jake dying, dying and dying again. 

His nails are digging into his skin and he can’t breathe, and his eyes burn with the memory of the tears he shed after the 32rd loop, sitting on the crate as he tells them it doesn’t matter what they do, he’ll get them killed. His lungs are tight. 

Eve’s speech about brave soldiers echoes in his head. His heart pounds. He isn’t brave. But the look that went with the story is etched into his mind, the softness in Eve’s eyes and that feeling of being admired and loved that runs through him at the attention she gives him. He remembers the look she gave him when he told her that he liked the way her eyes spoke of so many words beyond the story of the two colonels. His heart slows. They are okay.

His friends are okay **.** The loop is long over, and Eve and Flynn are back whole and safe. There is no reason for him to freak out like this. 

He wants to laugh at his thoughts. But all he hears from himself is a choked off sound that makes him feel incredibly small. Ezekiel has always hated feeling small. He knows the feeling all too well and as he looks at the time on his phone, white numbers telling him it’s four a.m., he knows there is no way for him to fall back asleep tonight. 

He wonders if he will ever sleep again. The memories he just regained are playing over and over and he wonders how so much could have taken him so long to remember. Maybe he could rein them back in, back to where they were hiding before.

How much time did they spend in the loop? How many hours, days was he trapped in that hell, for how many days did he fail at saving his friends? 

How many times was he the reason for their blood coating the floors of DARPA?  

He stares at his hands, any pretense at suppressing the onslaught of memories gone. He can feel a phantom ache in his right hand, can almost see the blisters forming on the skin. He curls his fingers in and is reminded of Baird’s gun in the same hand, feeling like its weight was made for him. He thinks of the way his muscles seemed to remember exactly what they were supposed to do, almost seven years after he last held a gun, eight since he fired one. The movement is easy, practiced to perfection. 

He’s glad he didn’t shoot Jake that last loop. Eve would have known. She would have seen how simple it was for him to fire a gun one-handed, would have seen how true his aim was. She would have put the pieces together and Ezekiel can’t take any more soft looks like the ones she wore during her story. 

He wishes the memories had stayed hidden wherever they had come from. He wishes for it desperately, pleads silently for them to retreat. How is he supposed to go back to the Library like this? The others will notice, will ask questions. Ezekiel can’t do it. 

His phone is bright in his dark room and he wishes he didn’t put a number code on it. His vision blurs and his hands are clutching a control panel, an alarm is blaring in his ears and Jake yells “Some master thief” from right behind him. Cassandra’s grip on his hand slips away and Eve and Stone are nowhere to be seen. 

His phone vibrates and Ezekiel lets it drop, breath heavy and wet as he tries to rein in his panic. He should check on them, he has to check on them. He needs to see that they’re okay. 

His hand burns and the pain is sudden, white and hot. Eve’s fingers wrap a bandage around the burn and Jake tells him how heroic it was, Cassandra scolding him quietly for hurting himself this badly. A car drives by his apartment and Ezekiel lets out a shaky breath. 

His room comes into focus and the sky outside is lighter than before. His hand aches and his head feels heavy, as if all the memories have a physical weight. 

His legs are crossed underneath him. His covers are on the floor, a pile of dark fabric that makes him shudder. The folds move around in his vision and take the shape of the first monster. His nails catch onto his sweatpants and he closes his eyes. 

He is in his room, he tells himself. He’s not trapped. He can get out. He isn’t stuck. 

The memory of Cassandra and Jake ignoring his warning echoes when he starts saying it out loud. His voice is thin as he repeats it over and over again, filling the room with desperation. I’m not trapped, I can get out. I’m not trapped, I’m not trapped, not trapped.

Trapped. That’s what he is. Jake is banging on the glass and Eve is asking questions and Cassandra keeps voicing her concern. But it is Ezekiel who is truly trapped. He is trapped and the blinking neon sign above the exit is nothing but temptation, like a mouse trap about to snap. Ezekiel does not cope well with being trapped. 

But he  _ was _ trapped, he tells himself. He was. He isn’t anymore. He opens his eyes and a red gaze stares back but it isn’t real he says out loud. He isn’t trapped in this room, the door is unlocked. 

He’s trapped inside of himself. His mind is enough of a cage, every loop an ice cold bar that keeps him from escaping. Even the realization of it doesn’t help Ezekiel as his vision blurs again to morph his room into the base, his covers into rage filled monsters and the traffic outside into the screams of his friends.

As the sky gets lighter and lighter, sun stretching its rays across the land, Ezekiel Jones is trapped by his own mind and cannot get out.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I'm cruel.  
> Criticism is greatly appreciated.  
> You can also come yell at me on [tumblr](madnessiseverything.tumblr.com).  
> Until next time.


End file.
